7 New Facebook Changes Impacting Businesses

By Andrea Vahl
Published March 5, 2012

Facebook pages are changing. And that means your business strategy will need to change.

In fact, Facebook has made many new changes that will impact anyone with a Facebook page.

These changes emerged from Facebook’s fMC 2012 Conference.

The overall message was that Facebook is looking at pages as a “mission control” point (which is where the MC comes from in the conference title).

Here is an overview of the changes and how brands can take advantage of some of the new features.

#1: Cover Photo and Profile Image

Obviously one of the biggest changes that we all knew was coming was the cover photo. No more photo strip across the top. You now have one large image to showcase your page. This image must be a minimum of 399 pixels across to be used as the cover photo. But you can have a photo cover designed to take advantage of the extra space you get. The cover photo maximum dimensions are 850 pixels by 315 pixels.

The new Timeline cover photo.

Twitter rolls out new brand pages

Twitter unveiled a major redesign today which will be rolling out slowly. We’ve covered some of the main aspects already such as the new timeline and discover features, as well as how Twitter is trying to become more mainstream and accessible.

One major change for brands, however, is new brand pages. Not everyone can see what these look like yet, so I’ve pasted some screenshots here from @AmericanExpress, @generalelectric, @JetBlue, and @@McDonalds. The two big changes are a new banner just below the profile information that stretches across the page and the ability to pin a tweet at the top of each brand’s stream. This will give brands a more distinctive presence on Twitter, and should roll out more widely in the first quarter of 2012.

The pinned tweet is particularly effective for tweets with images or video. With the new design, videos and images can be seen inline within your stream (just click “Open” on the top right for tweets with images or videos). On brand pages, these video or photo tweets can be set to be open, adding another visually engaging element to the page.

Twitter is launching the new brand pages with 21 partners. If you have the enhanced version of Twitter enabled, you can see them here: @AmericanExpress, @BestBuy, @bing, @chevrolet, @CocaCola, @Dell, @DisneyPixar, @generalelectric, @Heineken, @HP, @intel, @JetBlue, @Kia, @McDonalds, @nikebasketball, @NYSE_Euronext, @GhostProtocol, @pepsi, @Staples, @subwayfreshbuzz, and @VerizonWireless.

You can also read about the changes on Twitter’s advertising blog.

SEO for Branding and Why it Matters for Brand Development

How to Get Multiple Profiles to the top of the SERPS for Your “Brand Search”

First of all, what do I mean when I say “multiple profiles”? Pretty simple. Just stack page 1 with your separate web identities such as your Home Page, Blog, Facebook Profile, Twitter Profile, Linkedin Profile, Articles you’ve written, Directories you’re a part of, Photos you’ve posted with alt tags(or that others have posted), your email newsletter archive, your products, and forums of which you’re a member. There. Is that ten yet? Yep, I just filled up page one. Want to see a live example? Do a search for Unity-Fair Trade Marketplace and there are pages of results for that “brand”.

So how do you do it? There is some work involved. First, you need to actually set up all of these profiles in the first place. Pace yourself and try to get to one or two per week. Next, you need to start building back-links to these profiles which can be manually intensive. The back-links will raise the rankings of each profile over time. A tool that I like is called LotusJump. Third, re-visit these profiles, cross post links between them, and fill them up with valuable content that creates Link Bait. Link Bait is when you create natural links back to your profiles because people are actually excited about it. It’s really the best form of organic traffic.

So why is it important? Because I said so. Just kidding. Because you don’t want people confused when they search for you and get multiple results of things that sound similar coming up on the first page of Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Because you want people to be able to choose the profile that interests them most right away (ie Facebook, your blog, or your contact page). Make sense?

There. That was short and to the point. I hope it was helpful. If you need any help, don’t hesitate to contact me!

Get Found.

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